Anti Uncle Tom Novels

Illustration forFrank Freeman's Barber Shop

In his Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture, Thomas F. Gossett
lists 27 pro-slavery works written in response to Stowe's novel between 1852 and
the Civil War.* These novels were
written by men and women, northerners and southerners. They adopt a variety of
polemical strategies, from defending the plantation as a good place to attacking
the North for its treatment of "white slaves" (the working class) to depicting
blacks as either happy in slavery or racially unfit for freedom. None of these
novels attained anything like the popular success of Stowe's book, but some went
through a number of printings and were widely read in the North. As a group they're interesting for several
reasons -- for what they say about race and about sectionalism, and for what
they say about Uncle Tom's Cabin. It's telling to see which of Stowe's
characters and scenes get evoked, and how they get rewritten. It's also perhaps
surprising to see how many similarities exist, how little some aspects of
Stowe's protest novel had to be changed in order to serve the other side of the
issue she was protesting against. A goal of the site is to include at least
chapters from all the
"anti-Tom" novels. Here are the texts currently available. (There were even
"anti-Tom" children's books. One of them, Little Eva: The Flower of the
South, is available in the archive's UTC AS CHILDREN'S BOOK section.)